Housings for electrical devices, such as connectors, circuit breakers, relays and fuse panels, are used in many applications, including recreational vehicles such as motor homes and boats. In a typical application, the housing carries a number of conventional circuit breakers in a side-by-side or stacked parallel arrangement and a door or cover to close and partially seal the housing. The breakers are physically mounted on a busbar made of conductive metal with spaced parallel fingers called “stabs” which project into spring contacts within each breaker body.
Typically such a busbar is made by extruding a long aluminum element having the desired cross section, i.e., a base plate with parallel upstanding ribs, and cutting the extruded section into short, identical pieces. Such a process of manufacture is expensive in that it requires the creation of an extrusion die, the purchase of an extrusion press, and further in that it requires significant hand labor to carry out the various operations involved in the manufacturing process.